Call That A Sea Lion?

Honestly – that’s not a sealion – that’s a mermaid in a mask. This, apparently, is the Greenwich Hospital coat of arms – so not a new design, as I had assumed last week, but a renewal of the old one. Joe found this banner in the ORNC, with the ‘correct’ badge on it.

My version last week was wrong in practically every detail – my red cross was diagonal, my crown is of the party hat variety instead of the seafarer/king style, my union flags don’t have St Patrick’s cross in them and my sealion is an actual animal of the ‘arnk, arnk’, ball-balancing-on-nose, fish-catching species, whereas theirs is – well, just made up…

And, I note, their Neptune doesn’t have a trident either, CB.

Huh.

Who wants to join with me in a campaign to get a proper sealion on the GH crest? It is, after all, one of the most pressing problems Greenwich faces just now.

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Greenwich Hospital Arms low

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 26th, 2013 at 7:55 am and is filed under Art, heraldry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Comments to “Call That A Sea Lion?”

Well, I suppose a seahorse in terms of heraldry is an actual horse with a fish tail, but I admit that an actual lion never occurred to me. Amazed that the Neptune doesn’t have a trident – surely that just makes him a Triton? And what a truly pathetic motto! Even I could decline/conjugate/translate (whatever, just no comments from Mary Beard please) that one.